Roll Your Own CD: Music Sites Push New Features

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Roll Your Own CD: Music Sites Push New Features

A team of music-loving computer scientists and hacker musicians at Tunes.com is creating programs that allow users to compile their dream CD on the Net, and receive it by mail a few weeks later - and even lets them search by acoustic similarities, finding a song that sounds like Led Zeppelin but is played by Cibo Matto.

"We believe that ultimately this is a technology play, not a retail play," says Kamran Mohsenin, CEO of the online music site. "The real question is, 'What can you do on the Net that you can't do in reality?'"

The Tunes.com upgrades, due out by March, echo a Web-wide music push to pile on intricate features in the face of new competition. Although MCI's 1-800-Music Now Web site and phone service will fold on 31 December, industry analysts are predicting an onslaught of new Web music services, and online stores are racing to offer more than click-and-buy convenience by creating online environments that encourage users to linger - and hopefully purchase more than what they originally set out to buy.

"Next year you're going to see all the major retail players and a lot of the mom and pops [come online]. To be a leader, you have to make sure your site is easy to use and feature-rich," said Jason Olim, president and co-founder of the online music retailer CDnow. One of the early adopters, CDnow has been online since August 1994, and claims to have more than a 50 percent market share. But it is suddenly playing technological catch-up to year-end start-ups Tunes.com and Camelot, the real-world retailer that set up shop on the Web earlier this month.

CDnow says it is developing a music recommendation engine - due out sometime next year - and adding new samples at a pace of "tens of thousands" every month. But it only has 150,000 samples to Tunes.com's 250,000, and Tunes.com already has a Firefly-style recommendation engine. The Camelot site is still in start-up mode, selling less than 100 CDs per day, but it plans to offer sound samples of every track on every album, and a recommendation engine, by next year.

Not everyone is starting the New Year by adding features. Mike Farrace, head of Tower Records new media, says "we don't want to bind the customer with too much stuff." From his point of view, input-gathering agents are too costly to buy and maintain. Instead, the Tower Records site guides users with reviews by professionals and other users.

The global Tower chain, like Camelot and other offline retailers that flock to the Net, brings with it the advantage of a recognizable brand name, said Nicole Vanderbilt, an analyst with the online industry market research firm Jupiter Communications. "If I go online and I'm going to search for CDs, I'm going to see if the people I visit in a traditional mall are online."

But Tunes.com thinks the real advantage is in the programming. Music is a particularly fertile area for complex interactivity, as MSN's Rifff has shown with a program that allows users to alter a musician's original work, hearing millions of different variations that never repeat. "We have greater concerns about what Microsoft is going to do [in online sales] than someone like Camelot," says Tunes.com's Mohsenin.